Critical Essay by Esther H. Schor

In this excerpt, Schor compares A Beleaguered City and the story "Earthbound," finding that each uses the confrontation with the supernatural as a metaphor for reading and interpretation.

In this essay, I will consider two of Oliphant's supernatural fictions from the late 1870s as highly experimental narratives about interpretation. In both "Earthbound" and A Beleaguered City, the encroachment of the Unseen on the Seen causes an interpretive crisis. While Oliphant's haunted interpreters enact our task as readers by confronting an uninterpreted "text," they also interrogate Oliphant's own authority as an interpreter of literature. As John Blackwood's "general utility woman"—her own phrase—Oliphant had published nearly ninety critical essays on literature, art, and history by the late 1870s. Merryn Williams's...